Surveillance analyst working for the military and various civilian agencies of the U.S. and various state governments intercept and store voluminous quantities of foreign-language communications requiring translation. The volume of foreign-language material requiring translation has increased greatly with stepped-up efforts to interrupt terrorist plots, enforce immigration laws and intercept traffic in illicit drugs and other contraband. The material requiring translation includes spoken messages and messages reduced to printed media, by way of example. Particularly vexing to the field of counterterrorism is the fact that the number of intelligence agents possessing both the necessary foreign language skills and the required security clearance is wholly inadequate relative to the volume of foreign-language message traffic requiring translation and analysis. One can readily appreciate that significant delay in the translation of key communications could result in the successful execution of additional terror strikes.
Surveillance personnel and analysts currently implement automated (i.e., computer-based) translators for translating spoken or written communications from a first human language to a second human language. As helpful as automated translators are, they still yield unwieldy volumes of translated information for native speakers of the second human language to process. Accompanying information of interest in the translated product are large amounts of information unrelated to the purpose for which surveillance is being conducted. In other words, precious automated and human resources are currently dedicated to the translation and analysis of unimportant information; a fact that increases monetary costs and, more importantly, introduces delay in the production of intelligible mission-critical information. A principal reason for this delay is that the automated translators currently in use translate the entirety of a communication rendered in the first human language to the second human language. Moreover, the translation is performed on a first-in-first-out basis such that, for example, outputted to an analyst is a transcript of the original communication translated to the second human language in the order in which it was originally rendered and with all of the important and unimportant content intermingled.
Based on the foregoing, there exists a need for a system and method of prioritizing the automated translations of communications from a first human language to a second human language in order to render more efficient and expedient the use of human and machine-based analytical resources.